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August 18, 2014

UN, Media: No Outrage

Last week in Syria, one percent of the al-Sheitaat tribe was
killed, 700 people, some by beheading. Their murderers are members of ISIS,
known also as Islamic State.

On a single weekend last month, another 700 people were killed
in Syria. Syria’s war death toll is up to nearly 200,000.

This past Friday, in one small village in Iraq, ISIS
executed 80 Kurdish men and kidnapped 100 women and children. Elsewhere in
Iraq, they hauled off 300 Kurdish women
to rape. Young girls returned to their families and committed suicide.

On a single day this month, ISIS slaughtered 1,500 Iraqi Christians.
Christians have been fleeing Iraq, where they will be murdered unless they
convert to Islam. At least 200,000 have fled to Kurdistan.

Both Israel and the Palestinian Authority apparently believe
that ISIS is responsible for some of the rockets fired from Gaza into
Israel.

ISIS objects that Hamas is “not doing enough to destroy Israel”
and Hamas considers ISIS to be a threat to their own power.But they have the same long-term
goals—establishing an Islamic caliphate.

A practical difference between ISIS and Hamas at the moment
is that Hamas is attacking Israel, a strong country with a strong army. The
Jews of Iraq, a community with a 2500-year history, experienced over many years
what the Iraqi Christians are experiencing now. There are no longer Jews in Iraq.

Like ISIS, Hamas uses terror, targets civilians, and
executes political opponents. They kill their own people as “suspected collaborators.”
Using cement intended for building homes to instead build terror tunnels,
setting up headquarters in hospitals, launching rockets from neighborhoods,
ordering their own citizens not to evacuate dangerous areas and at the same
time preventing or intimidating journalists from filming or reporting Hamas’s
actions are all in line with their strategies that may seem more complex than
those used by ISIS. But their larger agendas
are the same.

That there is so little attention to the horrific slaughters
by ISIS or to the violence and subterfuge of Hamas threatens all of us who are their
intended targets.